A.S. Jika, a police cadet in course 9 of the 100-level program at the Nigeria Police Academy in Wudil, Kano State, passed away on Saturday morning after suffering from malnutrition and persistent starvation for more than two weeks, which sparked unrest there.
Some of the cadets, according to The Punch, said that the Commandant, Assistant Inspector-General, Sadiq Abubakar, was haughty and mismanaged the students’ dining budget in a financial sense.
Jika, who hailed from the state of Adamawa, was a member of the computer science department. He reportedly passed out early on Saturday morning inside the bathroom. The injured was brought to the academy’s clinic, a cadet told The Punch.
“He was left untreated because there are no drugs and there is no medical officer to attend to him in the unconducive environment, before he gave up and died,” the source continued.
According to a another source, it is common for cadets to pass out and the understaffed clinic sees a lot of unwell recruits every day.
“Since the new commandant took over, they’ve been feeding us very poorly and insufficiently,” he said. The deceased boy was not yet 20 years old. If they had responded to the youngster, he would not have perished. The commandant also authorized unjustified training exercises to take place during lecture hours and ordered the market and laundry closed.
Cadets here regularly pass out from exhaustion during training because they are either starving, malnourished, or both. The commandant generally intimidates us and makes us participate in pointless training activities. Many cadets are attempting to regulate themselves to avoid being expelled from the academy because many have been dismissed on the grounds that they became ill.